Eurostat data reveals that the 11% of the total population of the European Union is unable to keep their home adequately warm. Caused by low household income, high energy bills, and low dwelling energy efficiency, energy poverty has traditionally been associated with the inability of households to meet their heating needs during winter. However, up to the 19% of households declared not being comfortably cool in summer. Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, with the last five years comprising the five hottest. Not to mention this 2019 June has been the hottest on record. Climate change is increasing both the severity and frequency of extreme hot weather and heat waves and in dense urban areas, these heatwave episodes will be combined with the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, worsening city centres temperatures which will negatively impact human health and wellbeing. Thus, cooling needs and overheating risk need to be incorporated into the energy poverty equation. The project COOLtoRISE aims to reduce summer energy poverty incidence among European households improving their indoor thermal habitability conditions and reducing their energy needs during the hot season, which will decrease their exposure to heat and heat-related health risks. Not all households have an air conditioning system and it is known that energy poor households make a restrictive use of heating and cooling as they cannot afford associated energy bills. However, raising awareness on summer energy poverty and implementing actions to mitigate it will have a double benefit on European households. First, heat exposure of energy poor households will be reduced by increasing indoor thermal conditions, which will decrease in their risk to suffer heat related diseases. Second, raising summer energy culture and preventing air conditioning devices to be installed can have serious benefits on climate change preventing future emissions.

Considering that energy management has become a high important issue in future Europe and that there’s a huge lack of trained people to meet the energy management needs, it’s a must to develop a clear, transparent, transnational and crossbording e-training. As SMEs represent more than 9O% of the enterprises and more than 70% of the employment in the participating countries, it’s good to meet these enterprises in their needs for qualified energy managers. The project EEMS4SME or European Energy Management Specialists for SMEs will therefore develop an open training and innovative digital platform all over Europe. A lifelong learning digital environment will be established in the field of energy management to answer the huge lack of global training and vision for energy management, which can thus create employment all over Europe. This innovative e-learning platform is ideal to support individuals in acquiring and developing key competences to aim employability and personal development in a fast changing technical and environmental world. The training will support the development of national and cross-country sectoral skills strategies and will support permeability between different training pathways all over Europe. It will tackle all discrimination in gender, age and race as individuals can learn whenever they want, which is ideal to combine work and training. An international digital training with similar understanding will cross the borders of different regions, cultures and legislations.The transparency and comparability of energy management qualifications and learning outcomes will support labour mobility and facilitate transitions between training and the world of work in energy management all over Europe and will thus create employment chances for women, disabled, unemployed graduates in the energy management field, which is an investigation in Europe’s future.In the strategic partnership a good balance is reached between reliable expertise in education and training in energy efficient technologies for students and for adults with the university Thomas More Kempen – Knowledge Centre for Energy (Belgium), the balikesir sustainable development association (Turkey) and the Association Ecoserveis (Spain) on the one hand and partners with good knowledge of the needs of SMEs as the Chamber of Installation Specialists in Bulgaria (CISB), and the Chamber of Commerce of Padua (Italy). All partners have experience in developing training programs and in qualification and re-qualification of technicians and experts. Furthermore the partnership represents different climate conditions spread all over EU and partners have links with EU wide networks to disseminate the projects results. The exchange of best practices and the merge of different insights and experiences from partners all over Europe will guarantee a good common training program for energy management to meet the needs of many SMEs in Europe.In the course of this project, training activities will be carried out, respectively : Train the trainer, Energy Management Specialist training program and e-learning modules. The train the trainer course is transnational, will take place in Turkey during 5 days and is meant for 2 trainers of each participating country. It will be given by highly certified experts in energy management. The target is double : the different national training modules will be reviewed in order to decide how they will be processed in one global online platform and the trainers will be able to disseminate the training in energy management in their country in the second phase as a test for the online course. This second training is meant for SME staff to become energy management specialists. By an e-learning trajectory and a contact seminar the participants will be able to share their experiences, so that all the experiences can be discussed in a transnational project meeting to optimise the e-learning modules. In this respect, Energy Management System Training of SMEs personnel should be considered as a key target. For the process of dissemination, e-learning modules will be developed and will help the program to reach a wider audience. In the third phase at least 500 people will be trained during the project time with the global e-learning module for energy management specialists.The expected results will be realized is 2 dimensions : national and transnational.A national energy management structure will be available to implement in the facilities. (ISO 50001) and a certified expertise will establish sustainable energy management in the SMEs. A transnational digital platform for adults all over Europe who wish to specialize in energy management and energy efficiency, will be available. An inventarisation of exchanges of best practices in all units of the organisations will reduce energy consumption and production costs and will help to reduce emissions. This project will offer an effective way to mitigate global warming.

There is a compelling need of encouraging energy efficiency in buildings, enhance green technologies and promote advance thermal energy storage solutions. TESSe2b will enable the optimal use of renewable energy and provide one of the most advantageous solutions for correcting the mismatch that often occurs between the supply and demand of energy in residential buildings. The target of TESSe2b is to design, develop, validate and demonstrate a modular and low cost thermal storage technology based on solar collectors and highly efficient heat pumps for heating, cooling and domestic hot water (DHW) production. The idea is to develop advanced compact integrated PCM TES tanks exploiting RES (solar and geothermal) in an efficient manner coupled with enhanced PCM borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) that will take advantage of the increased underground thermal storage and maximize the efficiency of the ground coupled heat pumps (GCHP). The two TES tanks developed within TESSe2b project will be integrated with different PCM materials; (i) enhanced paraffin PCM, (ii) salt-hydrates PCM, while in both of them a highly efficient heat exchanger will be included. Even if the concept of phase change thermal stores has been demonstrated, TESSe2b project discriminates itself through incorporating; (i) PCM materials innovation, (ii) advanced energy management through self-learning model-based control system, (iii) enhanced PCM BHEs (v) compact modular design of thermal storage tank. Since the lifetime of TESSe2b solution is among the most critical factors determining its acceptability, reliability and success the on the long run, special emphasis will be given in the life-expectancy of the involved components.

<< Background >>PlayGreen comes with one theory: there is a need to enhance sustainability in sports, but sports can also be a platform for people interested in sustainability to be more active. We wanted to test this theory in four countries with environmental volunteers. The selected sport was football which is largely a male-dominated sport and, since environmental volunteers are mainly women, PlayGreen also wanted to make females be more engaged in doing sports through the environmental incentive.<< Objectives >>O1: Create volunteering opportunities focused on sport and environment for young people to engage in sport, by testing and promoting a new volunteering format. The idea is that environmental volunteers will engage in playing sports if they are driven to green sports events.O2: Create a European network of organisations enhancing sustainability in grassroots sports through volunteering programs and the sharing of good practices. This ensures that knowledge is distributed to other organisations.<< Implementation >>I1: Mentoring was offered to environmental volunteers online through a series of knowledge (webinars) and practice (videos, resources and workshops) , so that they could prepare the green event which was organized in each participating country.I2: During the PlayGreen events, communication was done to gather a network of organisations. A newsletter was created as well as a dedicated Instagram account. Multiplier Events were dedicated to promote the project resources and foster replicability.<< Results >>R1: 4 webinars and 4 practice videos were produced and watched 775 times, on top of the 212 registrants to the webinars where sports and sustainability specialists talked both to provide knowledge and to be role models and inspire. 9 PlayGreen events also took place in 4 countries using the mentoring tools.R2: More than 200 organisations in the field of sustainability and sports were reached.R3: A total of 14 sustainable sport events were organized and 9 were able to be carried out.